October 2016

Sunday, July 31, 2016

I was raised Catholic if being raised Catholic means that I was baptized as an infant and as an 8 year old, I received my first communion. I distinctly remember as a child going to Mass with Mom. I can remember darkened churches, high ceilings, the smells of incense, ladies in veils, reverence, holiness and awe.

Sadly, what I cannot recall is being taught much about the Eucharist, about the Saints, about Mother Mary or the Church Fathers, about the richness and depth of the faith, about God's mercy abounding through the Sacraments. All that which delineates Catholicism from the rest of Christianity.

As a result, I wandered, for a period of roughly 40 years, from the Church I now embrace fully, a wandering I've come to regret for the time lost in learning and then living the faith.

In a piece that touches initially on Mike Pence's Catholic upbringing and his own subsequent wandering, Sherry Weddell delves deeper into what has become a rite of passage for too many Catholics:

Mike Pence has a lot of company in the evangelical world. The Pew 2014 U.S. “Religious Landscape Survey” found that 13% of adults raised Catholic now consider themselves to be evangelicals (roughly 6 million people). And leaving the Church as an undergrad is all too normal. White college-age Millennials (ages 18-24) are 17 times more likely to leave the Catholic Church than to enter it. Young Catholic Millennials are also 10 times more likely to leave the faith of their childhood than a college-age white evangelical, according to the 2012 “Millennial Values Survey” sponsored by the Public Religion Research Institute.

But where Catholics proactively evangelize, there is real hope. A fascinating new finding is that 6% of American adults are cradle Catholics who now call themselves Protestants or “nones,” while still feeling at least partially Catholic. Pew has a term for adults who don’t think of themselves as Catholic in terms of religious practice but who do think of themselves as “partially Catholic” for other reasons: “cultural Catholics.”

While most committed cradle Catholics don’t have a mental category for “Bapticatholic” or “half-Catholic none,” many 21st-century spiritual wanderers do. It is no accident that Mike Pence called himself an “evangelical Catholic” for years.

What is both astonishing and hopeful is that 43%, or just over 6 million, of these cradle Catholics-turned “cultural Catholics” told Pew surveyors that they were open to the possibility of returning to the faith. They either feel connected to Catholic culture or to the Church through family, or they identify with certain Catholic beliefs or practices. As evangelizers, it is essential that we remember that those who do leave often retain significant emotional, spiritual and/or cultural connections or bridges to Catholicism over which they could return with our help.

Another reason that Mike Pence’s story causes many Catholics to feel consternation has to do with the most startling finding of the 2007 U.S. “Religious Landscape Survey.” It is this: Only 60% of Catholic adults believed in a personal God, and less than half were not certain that they could have a personal relationship with God. The survey also found that 78% of Catholics who eventually left for the evangelical-Protestant world said that their spiritual needs weren’t being met. According to the survey, teens who had been raised Catholic and later become Protestant as adults experienced a huge 49% growth in the “very strong” faith category. In fact, Catholic adults-turned-Protestant measured 25% higher in “very strong” faith than those raised Catholic who had retained their Catholic identity. Catholics who become Protestant also report 21% higher church attendance. It is a terrible irony that the best guarantee of regular adult church attendance at the moment among Americans raised Catholic is to become Protestant.

I have no problem at all believing that the idea of a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ” had not been part of Mike Pence’s spiritual experience before he went away to college. That’s because the language of “personal relationship” with God sounds either odd or suspiciously Protestant to many Catholics. Since my book Forming Intentional Disciples was published four years ago, I have had many conversations with Catholic leaders — bishops, seminary faculty, priests, religious and lay leaders — who told me that they were not yet disciples when they began their ministry. A disciple is someone who is intentionally seeking to follow Jesus Christ as Lord in the midst of his Church. One man, who was in full-time ministry forming clergy, told me, “Until I read your book last month, I didn’t know it was possible to have a personal relationship with God.” When I recovered from my shock, I responded, “Help me understand why you think this came about.” He said that his parents were very faithful, practicing Catholics. “We never talked about [our] relationship with God,” he told me. “I just didn’t know.”

The wonderfully hopeful news is that I have seen an extraordinary change over the past four years. Catholic leaders at all levels are beginning to seriously deal with our failure to make disciples of our own, as the last four popes have asked us to do. Pastors and leadership in hundreds of American parishes and whole dioceses are deliberately breaking the cultural silence about having a personal relationship with Christ and banding together to make intentional disciples of the already baptized in parishes, campus ministries, families and schools. Increasingly, we get it.

In the 21st-century West, God has no grandchildren. Faith is not simply inherited, but personally chosen. Therefore, cultural Catholicism by itself is dead as a retention strategy. If we forget and fall back into maintenance mode, we now have Mike Pence as a living reminder that if we don’t make disciples of our own, someone else will do it for us.

We are pressured today, from every corner it seems, to keep our faith to ourselves, to not allow it to enter the public sphere. We are pressured externally certainly but also internally by the knowledge that as sinners, we make terrible witnesses. It becomes far too easy to be branded hypocrites or worse, to be charged with being judgmental, for merely speaking Catholic/Christian truth and so many of us decide being public about the faith isn't worth the price or we buy into the lie that keeping our faith to ourselves is what's best.

Sherry tells us things are changing and I pray she is correct... as I pray that I will change to bring about that wider change to which she speaks.

Sitting with head bowed and eyes closed, Pope Francis paid silent tribute to the victims of one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century.

The pope arrived July 29 at the Auschwitz-BirkenauNazi death camp in Oswiecim, an area now blanketed by green fields and empty barracks lined by barbed wire fences, remnants of a horror that remains embedded in history.

Used by the Nazis from 1940 to 1945, the camp was the Nazi’s largest and consisted of three parts: Auschwitz I, where many were imprisoned and murdered; the Birkenau extermination camp — also known as Auschwitz II — and Auschwitz III (Auschwitz-Monowitz), an area of auxiliary camps that included several factories.

In 1942, Auschwitz became the site of the mass extermination of over 1 million Jews, 23,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war and thousands of Polish citizens of different nationalities.

Among those killed were St. Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Conventual Franciscan friar, and Edith Stein, a Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism and became a Carmelite nun, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

...

The pope then made his way to Block 11 to greet a dozen survivors of the camp, including a 101-year-old violinist, who survived by being in the camp orchestra. Pope Francis greeted each survivor individually, gently grabbing their hands and kissing their cheeks.

Among the survivors was Naftali Furst of Bratislava, Slovakia, who was deported to Auschwitz and was evacuated to Buchenwald in January 1945 before his liberation.

Furst, who now lives in Israel, gave the pope a photograph showing him and other inmates imprisoned in the Auschwitz barracks.

Pope Francis also signed a book for Furst before he made his way toward the “death wall” where thousands of prisoners were lined up and shot in the back of the head before their bodies were sent to the crematoriums.

Candle in hand, the pope lit an oil lamp in front of the wall, before praying and laying his hand on the wall. He then turned around and entered the barracks of Block 11.

Also known as “the death block” because the Nazis used it to inflict torture, it houses the cell where St. Maximilian Kolbe spent his final hours, starved and dehydrated before being given a lethal injection of carbolic acid.

Pope Francis entered the darkened cell, illuminated by a faint light from the corridor, revealing a candle, an engraved plaque marking the site of the Franciscan friar’s death, and countless words — even a cross — etched on the walls by those who spent their final moments in the starvation cell.

Once again Pope Francis sat in silence with his head bowed. Alone in the cell for eight minutes, he occasionally looked up to contemplate his surroundings.

Outside the cell, he signed the visitors’ book, writing a simple message: “Lord, have mercy on your people. Lord, forgive so much cruelty.”

His day began early with 7:30 Mass at St. Mary’s Our Lady of the Lake Catholic Church, a short walk from the Hall of Fame. As he left the church, he met with a beaming Father John Rosson, who said, “We have a celebrity in church this morning.” Piazza asked for and received a special blessing from the priest. Piazza signed autographs and took pictures with parishioners.

In his acceptance speech Piazza thanked both his parents and described his Catholic faith as the greatest gift of all from his parents, especially his mother, Veronica:

She gave me the gift of my Catholic faith, the greatest gift a mother could give a child, which has had a profound impact on my career and has given me patience, compassion and hope. Pope Benedict the XVI said, ‘One who has hope, lives differently.’ Mom, you raised five boys, and you were always there for me.’

Piazza has often credited his Catholic upbringing as being the foundation of his life. He was one of the athletes featured in the evangelization movie, "Champions of Faith", about the journey of Christian athletes. He regularly attends special Masses held at baseball stadiums around the country for the players and is sometimes a lector.

Who among us will ever forget this moment, captured beautifully by Major League Baseball:

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The Register piece closes with these words of wisdom from the man:

We want to try to get closer to God. We want to try to be like Jesus. We always want to try to get on that horse and do the right thing, and be positive. And be positive not just for yourself but for other people.

In the speech marking his induction into Cooperstown’s Baseball Hall of Fame, former National League all-star Mike Piazza quoted, of all the things in the world to quote, Pope Benedict’s encyclical Spe Salvi. “Those who have hope live differently,” he said, with the authority of a 62nd-round draft pick who went on to hit more home runs than any catcher in the history of the sport, including Yogi Berra and Johnny Bench.

"The function of the two-party system in our republic---where numerous unique interests compete, yet strive to coexist in peace---is to muster consensus along the broadest possible lines. Those lines in the United States are Left and Right: destruction or conservation, secularism or faith, death or life, dependency or responsibility, pessimism or optimism, relativism or objective truth, anarchy or the rule of law, state control or personal freedom.

Sure, you can form your own political party with the 5 other guys in the world who think precisely as you do, but your effect on the culture is bound to be nil, or close to it; to affect society, you must team up with people of dissimilar interests, and a two-party system is the most efficient way of doing this.

Christians like Sensing don't seem to realize that the Perfect is not just an enemy of the Good, but its deadliest enemy, and that petulantly withholding their votes until Perfection or Apocalypse comes not only hurts their fellow Christians, but also hurts every other innocent person in the world who relies upon the prevalence of Christian ideals to make their lives bearable. Think, for a moment, of the tens of thousands of Yazidis, secular Iranians, Iraqis and Syrians, and Middle Eastern Christians who would still be alive today if the Left had not prevailed in our last presidential election. They prevailed because Christians like Sensing refused to participate over some self-righteous and, frankly, selfish reservation about a candidate.

In this instance, Donald Trump, however absurd it may seem to us, is currently bearing the standard for American Christians. Voting for him is voting against all the injustice and misery that will be caused if the Left prevails---all the evil, all the chaos, all the innocent blood that is bound to be shed.

I would remind Reverend Sensing and other Christians---who really ought to know better---that the Jews of Christ's time had such a fixation on the Messiah appearing in the form of a strong military commander that when he ultimately appeared in the form of a carpenter, they were unable to recognize him. Some---hell, all---of the greatest figures in the Bible are deeply flawed: murderers, adulterers, liars, etc.

For:

"...my power is made perfect in weakness..."

and

"...the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom..."

Withholding your vote is not a sign of virtue; in fact, it may be the exact opposite. Selfish pride is the worst of all sins.

Voting for the side that best represents Christian interests, however imperfectly, allows the Christian point of view to stay in the game. Abandon the field, and we lose all possibility of influence on the greater society.

I am an Eastern Orthodox Christian who is sick to death at the cowardice and sanctimony of American Christians and their self-absorbed rationalizations for not participating in the current political battles shaping our society. Because they insist on operating at such an 'exalted' ethical level, America now has atheists, statists and terrorists running the show.

Saturday, July 23, 2016

If there were a morally acceptable candidate offered by either major party, of course you could vote for that person in clear conscience. There isn’t, and therefore many people are settling for choosing the least-bad candidate.

Don’t do this.

Vote third party.

Why?

Voting third party is the most effective way for you to bring about a change of regime.

It’s more effective than a write-in campaign (barring a massive, united, nationwide campaign, which I don’t see happening). It’s certainly more effective than abstaining — no one will notice you’re missing, and other than a few kind souls at the League of Women Voters, no one will much care that you couldn’t be bothered to show up.

When you vote third party, you send a clear, unequivocal message that is formally recorded and measured. You indicate to the major parties, and to the rest of the citizenry, which way the reform needs to go in order to field a winning candidate.

Voting third party will not cause the person you cast your vote for to win. It will, however, cause the next round of candidates, at every level of elected office, to seek to be more like what it would take to win your vote.

Candidates need your vote. They watch the polls and try to read the wind and guess which way to shift in order to ride popular opinion.

By voting third party, you most clearly communicate what your expectations are and how the next cycle’s candidates need to be different. Among other benefits, voting third party informs the major parties what kinds of candidates they should support at the local and state level — which candidates feed the system for the years ahead.

If you care about the future, don’t settle for the sick feeling that comes from knowing that you helped fuel the victory of some person whose policies you abhor. Vote like you mean for your republic to still be a functioning democracy ten, twenty, even two-hundred years from now.

I've been thinking more and more about what I plan to do in November. Earlier, I was seriously considering writing somebody, anybody, in for President as I know with certainty that I cannot in good conscience vote for Trump, whose moral failings, his lack of foreign policy knowledge and his constitutional ignorance rule him out. Nor could I vote for for Hillary who I see to be the most corrupt politician in modern history and whose party has made a complete mess of things whenever and wherever they've been in power.

Roughly a week ago, I started seriously thinking about The Constitution Party as a plausible alternative though as of this writing, they're not yet on the ballot here in my home state.

What say those of you out there who won't be voting for either Hillary or Trump? What will you folks be doing?

We are engaged in a war, one that has been declared against us long before 9/11 – whether we want to acknowledge that fact or not. We face an enemy that may hide its face but not its ugly motives, that talks with bravado but is nothing short of cowardly.

France seems to have taken the brunt of the most recent attacks, an onslaught that has also hit us hard here in the US and scores of other places around the world.

The obvious answer is yes. The preservation of innocent human life must take precedence.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church can help instruct us. And, while we must resist the urge to take things out of context in order to advance a particular agenda or a political point of view, the Church’s teachings are, I believe, clear when the threat to innocent human life is immediate, substantial, real, and on-going:

2265: Legitimate defense can be not only a right but a grave duty for one who is responsible for the lives of others. The defense of the common good requires that an unjust aggressor be rendered unable to cause harm. For this reason, those who legitimately hold authority also have the right to use arms to repel aggressors against the civil community entrusted to their responsibility [emphasis added].

2266: The efforts of the state to curb the spread of behavior harmful to people’s rights and to the basic rules of civil society correspond to the requirement of safeguarding the common good. Legitimate public authority has the right and duty to inflict punishment proportionate to the gravity of the offense.

So pray, yes. Most definitely pray.

But we can and should urge those who legitimately hold authority over us to use all arms necessary to quickly defeat this global and growing threat.

We are faced with choices today. At a time when all the short-term incentives point toward unreason, our leaders, political and cultural, must choose reason. At a time when group solidarity is trumping individual accountability, we must choose individual accountability. At a time when the loudest voices don’t wait for evidence to make sweeping judgments, we must wait for the evidence.

...

When we tribalize conflict, we create a tribalized society. It’s that simple. Stop lying and distorting facts for your own short-term political gain. It has been extraordinary to watch so many on the left and the right disregard the truth for the sake of “larger purposes.” A known lie such as “hands-up, don’t shoot” became the slogan of an entire movement. Scaremongers refused to deal with actual statistics and instead perpetuated the claim that police officers had declared “open season” on black men. Comprehensive reporting shows that police overwhelmingly use force when they are “under attack or defending someone who [is].” Despite the millions of interactions between police and citizens (including black citizens), the number of controversial or contentious shootings is low. It’s so low that in a nation of more than 300 million citizens, we can rattle off individual names – Laquan McDonald, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner – rather than consider the horror of mass death, of a true “open season.”

At the same time, it’s just as dishonest to pretend that police abuse is a fiction or that official racism has been vanquished. It is a simple fact that some police departments have covered up police misconduct (McDonald’s case comes immediately to mind) or, typically at the behest of their political masters, systematically abused the citizens they’re sworn to protect, turning them into ATMs for the state through excessive and burdensome fines and citations. While the Department of Justice’s investigation of the police shooting of Michael Brown exonerated officer Darren Wilson, for example, it painted an extraordinarily disturbing portrait of the use and abuse of official power in Ferguson, Missouri. Police made Ferguson a hell for its residents, a place where, as I wrote at the time, “a small class of the local power brokers creat[ed] two sets of rules, one for the connected and another for the mass of people who are forced – often at gunpoint – to pay for the ‘privilege’ of being governed.” No American man, woman, or child should have to live under such a regime. But the problem will never be solved if we refuse to acknowledge its complexities. No debate that so reflexively distorts reality will ever be productive.

...

Condemning the evil men and women who affiliate themselves with Black Lives Matter – people who tweet out applause for cop-killings – should not stop us from acknowledging that movement’s many more protesters who abhor violence and weep sincerely for the police lives lost last night. Condemning those cops who are bigoted should not stop us from acknowledging the many more cops who willingly lay down their lives for all citizens every single day. People of good faith can and should disagree about how best to prevent more lives from being lost in the future. But nothing will get better until everyone first recognizes that those with whom they disagree are people of good faith.

I've seen some of this tribalization in my own social media newsfeed today. People pouring gasoline on the flames. It's sickening, depressing, disgusting. And though I agree completely with Mr. French, I go a step further.

What ails this once great country will take divine healing. There's no way to get around this. It's factual. It's obvious. It's real.

We should all cry out for that healing, and there's no better way in my view for that to take place than to petition those who've been recognized by the Church as dispensers of that healing.

In her column this week, Peggy Noonan has written about an apparent dearth of genius, an inability for anyone in power to bring any sort of creative, constructive thinking to bear on the myriad problems and true evils that are before us, threatening every nation, and every people. She says we are missing the “genius cluster” that has always arisen — “Providentially,” her friend suggests — when the world has needed it to.

Where are the geniuses who will figure out how to fight a hidden yet determined international band of beasts who are committed to death — and all too willing to “be jihad in-place” — bringing the ISIS principles to local places of business and coming to a playground near you?

What we are seeing in ISIS is what we have seen before in the death-serving ideologies of the 20th centuries; totalitarian extremism never loses its desire to destroy all that does not conform. The illness is always the same. What has changed, though, is the antibody with which the West has previously addressed this killer virus. Like the culture itself, the antibody has shifted; it no longer contains one essential component necessary to fight the evil that instigates human savagery on this level, that of a faith.

There are no “genius clusters” arising to deal with ISIS, because there are no geniuses in leadership willing to look into the medicine bag and say “we have run out of faith in anything beyond our own selves, our court systems and bureaucracies…”

Consider that when the Nazis were barreling through Europe, the majority of the western world professed – with no fear of ridicule or of giving insult, anywhere – a belief in something greater than itself. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were conventionally religious men of their times, not overly observant. But they were imbued with enough faith to recognize that some occasions called for more than rhetoric; some things called for enough humility to make a prayer of supplication, one calling on the Deity to guide, to bless, to sustain – to, as Lincoln said, have “firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right.”

Our post-Christian, post-faith Western leadership is no longer capable of making public prayer, or willing to credit heaven with anything but twinkling stars. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair was told by his own government “we don’t do God” and President Obama, who once defined the notion of “sin” as being “out of alignment with my values” has not yet, in nearly 8 years, attempted to lead a nation in prayer.

This matters in the face of ISIS, especially in its revelation that its attempts to acquire power through fear are indiscriminate: they are murdering of all peoples, whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or agnostic.

If this is true, one might ask, then why especially should the West reacquaint itself with the language of faith and supernaturalism?

The answer is simple: because what ISIS is doing is a true evil.

The entire piece should be read, inwardly digested and passed on, particularly today when this great country celebrates freedom, a freedom absent the tethering and mooring of the guiding hand of God that will not last long.

Think on these things but more than that, pray... pray as Ms. Scalia has asked, for a "genius cluster" to rise, one that will not overlook the helping Hand of Heaven.

Friday, July 01, 2016

In the late 1980s, I was introduced to a self-styled Satanic high priestess. She called herself a witch and dressed the part, with flowing dark clothes and black eye shadow around to her temples. In our many discussions, she acknowledged worshipping Satan as his “queen.”

I’m a man of science and a lover of history; after studying the classics at Princeton, I trained in psychiatry at Yale and in psychoanalysis at Columbia. That background is why a Catholic priest had asked my professional opinion, which I offered pro bono, about whether this woman was suffering from a mental disorder. This was at the height of the national panic about Satanism. (In a case that helped induce the hysteria, Virginia McMartin and others had recently been charged with alleged Satanic ritual abuse at a Los Angeles preschool; the charges were later dropped.) So I was inclined to skepticism. But my subject’s behavior exceeded what I could explain with my training. She could tell some people their secret weaknesses, such as undue pride. She knew how individuals she’d never known had died, including my mother and her fatal case of ovarian cancer. Six people later vouched to me that, during her exorcisms, they heard her speaking multiple languages, including Latin, completely unfamiliar to her outside of her trances. This was not psychosis; it was what I can only describe as paranormal ability. I concluded that she was possessed. Much later, she permitted me to tell her story.

The priest who had asked for my opinion of this bizarre case was the most experienced exorcist in the country at the time, an erudite and sensible man. I had told him that, even as a practicing Catholic, I wasn’t likely to go in for a lot of hocus-pocus. “Well,” he replied, “unless we thought you were not easily fooled, we would hardly have wanted you to assist us.”

So began an unlikely partnership. For the past two-and-a-halfdecades and over several hundred consultations, I’ve helped clergy from multiple denominations and faiths to filter episodes of mental illness — which represent the overwhelming majority of cases — from, literally, the devil’s work. It’s an unlikely role for an academic physician, but I don’t see these two aspects of my career in conflict. The same habits that shape what I do as a professor and psychiatrist — open-mindedness, respect for evidence and compassion for suffering people — led me to aid in the work of discerning attacks by what I believe are evil spirits and, just as critically, differentiating these extremely rare events from medical conditions.

Is it possible to be a sophisticated psychiatrist and believe that evil spirits are, however seldom, assailing humans? Most of my scientific colleagues and friends say no, because of their frequent contact with patients who are deluded about demons, their general skepticism of the supernatural, and their commitment to employ only standard, peer-reviewed treatments that do not potentially mislead (a definite risk) or harm vulnerable patients. But careful observation of the evidence presented to me in my career has led me to believe that certain extremely uncommon cases can be explained no other way.

Do read the entire piece... it's simply fascinating, not just its content but the fact that it's in the Washington Post. Most intriguing indeed.

391 Behind the disobedient choice of our first parents lurks a seductive voice, opposed to God, which makes them fall into death out of envy.266 Scripture and the Church's Tradition see in this being a fallen angel, called "Satan" or the "devil".267 The Church teaches that Satan was at first a good angel, made by God: "The devil and the other demons were indeed created naturally good by God, but they became evil by their own doing."268

392 Scripture speaks of a sin of these angels.269 This "fall" consists in the free choice of these created spirits, who radically and irrevocably rejected God and his reign. We find a reflection of that rebellion in the tempter's words to our first parents: "You will be like God."270 The devil "has sinned from the beginning"; he is "a liar and the father of lies".271

393 It is the irrevocable character of their choice, and not a defect in the infinite divine mercy, that makes the angels' sin unforgivable. "There is no repentance for the angels after their fall, just as there is no repentance for men after death."272

394 Scripture witnesses to the disastrous influence of the one Jesus calls "a murderer from the beginning", who would even try to divert Jesus from the mission received from his Father.273 "The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil."274 In its consequences the gravest of these works was the mendacious seduction that led man to disobey God.

395 The power of Satan is, nonetheless, not infinite. He is only a creature, powerful from the fact that he is pure spirit, but still a creature. He cannot prevent the building up of God's reign. Although Satan may act in the world out of hatred for God and his kingdom in Christ Jesus, and although his action may cause grave injuries - of a spiritual nature and, indirectly, even of a physical nature- to each man and to society, the action is permitted by divine providence which with strength and gentleness guides human and cosmic history. It is a great mystery that providence should permit diabolical activity, but "we know that in everything God works for good with those who love him."275

Great mystery indeed but one I believe happens more often than we let on. All the more reason to pray this powerful intercessory prayer daily:

Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle; be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.